You really shouldn’t be able to go wrong with the premise of this movie. A man piloting a space ship with a cargo of people in suspended animation, flies into a meteor storm and crash lands on a planet. Surprise! The planet is Earth and it is the age of the dinosaurs! OH NO! Now he has to survive with nothing but a wrecked spaceship and a big gun.
“But…” you might say and sure there is a lot we could nitpick about the setup but that would be a category error. If you are choosing to watch this film, you are choosing to watch Adam Driver shoot dinosaurs with a hi-tech gun. “But why is he flying into this solar system if he is flying these people to a completely different planet somewhere else?” is not a legitimate question. The film comes pre-exempt from such criticism just as you can’t ask a rom-com to not depend so much on random coincidences or misunderstandings, or why cars are so prone to exploding in an action movie, or what the actual murder rate was among wealthy British people in a period murder mystery.
No. What you can and must demand from a film whose sole purpose is Adam Driver shooting dinosaurs with his space gun is that it be FUN. Sadly, this film is extraordinarily dull and serious while simultaneously being very silly. Driver is a great actor and does what he can with a script that has him as a pilot who has taken this job (which makes no sense) to pay for the healthcare of his terminally ill daughter (because he is actually from a pre-human alien civilisation from a different part of the galaxy that coincidentally has “healthcare” as a major plot driver just like 21st century America). He’s a sad guy but luckily he finds purpose when the only other survivor of the spaceship crash is a teenage girl who doesn’t speak English. Together they must walk 12 kilometres to find the other half of the ship which contains the escape pod.
12 kilometres isn’t very far but it is rough terrain and there are dinosaurs. Luckily Driver has a big gun but appears to have forgotten how to make fire. The dinosaurs aren’t that scared of his gun except then they are.
Many people have rightly objected to many modern genre films indulging in quips, banter and pop-culture references. They may be pleased to know that 65 avoids such things, they may be less pleased to know that it would have been a much better film if it had taken the more corny path. Being more “Whedonesque” wouldn’t have made it a good film by any stretch but it would have been less dull.
Likewise, the dinosaurs become reduced to little more than alien fauna and a generic threat. The appeal of dinosaur films is the idea that it would be cool to see dinosaurs doing dinosaur things. 65 reduces them to generic monsters which is just silly. Cut out the “this is all in the past” premise and have Driver attempting to survive on an alien planet then, while we wouldn’t get dinosaurs, we’d get potentially more weird and wacky monsters. Instead, the premise restrains the absurdity of the monsters without attempting to be a genuine attempt at paleontological accuracy or an excuse to indulge in dino-extravaganza.
This film simply is not stupid enough to be any good and also too stupid to be interesting.
Camestros Felapton 
16 responses to “Review: 65”
It’s in my streaming list on Netflix. I will probably watch it for myself eventually.
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I am slowly picking up international travel again for work, I figure I’ll catch it on an airplane sometime, when I don’t have anything else I’d want to do or watch. Might be a while, oh no….
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I enjoyed it slightly more than Camestros did, which is to say it was a modestly entertaining 90-ish minutes. The little girl and Driver are both very good in it. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from the trailer (the exception being I really wasn’t expecting most of the first fifteen minutes to be “Hey! Hope you really liked the opening of Pitch Black!”)
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I quit watching this about halfway through, because I was so bored I couldn’t go on. And I was not expecting a great film! I just wanted dinosaurs + Adam Driver. Unfortunately, somehow they managed to make that combo boring. I was sad.
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I realize this is not the main issue but: this is the most awkward/arbitrary use of a number as a title that I’ve ever seen. Like, it’d be cool if it were the number of dinosaurs they have to fight, or the original number of survivors before most of them get eaten by dinosaurs, or if our hero had just turned 65 and was about to retire before this happened… etc. But no, it’s the number of million years before the present, even though our “present” isn’t a concept that’s relevant to the protagonists, and “65 Million” would clearly be a more dramatic number– maybe they were trying to be coy and let us think it might only be 65 years ago, if only they hadn’t put dinosaurs in all the trailers.
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Other potentially better meanings for the title: 65 = a number of sins, or a number of Spartans, or someone’s attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 65, or how many films Fellini had made so far.
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It’s particularly irritating because by 65 million years ago the dinosaurs were all extinct – the Chicxulub impact was over a million years in the past by that point.
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I like Adam Driver, and actually he wasn’t bad in this, but this was just….dumb. An alien who looks just like a human and speaks English? Really? There are more than enough weird dinosaurs and weirder creatures from even further back in Earth’s history (using a T-Rex is pretty much an overtrodden cliche at this point) that they could have placed Adam Driver the human on an alien planet and told the same story.
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I’ll give them a pass on the speaking English part at least– I mean, it’s a standard enough convention that if all the characters are from another planet or a long-lost civilization then they just speak the audience’s language. I can’t think of any movie except The Passion of the Christ that translated literally all the dialogue into a language neither the audience nor the filmmakers ever spoke.
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Except…one of the characters doesn’t speak English and while that make sense in context it sort of highlights the fact that Driver’s alien does speak English, which still wouldn’t matter so much but for the film’s earnest tone
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That always annoys me.
In one of Terry Goodkind’s books (before I gave up on him) the invading army drops Italian words like “strega” for a witch. Since they’re not Italian or alt.Italian, why do they speak it? And does that imply that the main language is English after all rather than Translated Otherworld?
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As an occasional geology nerd, I feel compelled to speak up: While the end of the Cretaceous was dated to “about” 65 million years ago, additional radiometric measurements have improved the accuracy of that dating to 66 million years ago.
One might quibble that this improvement in accuracy is “recent”, but “recent” in this case is 2012; more than a decade ago, and I am pretty sure longer ago than when this film began development. [ https://stratigraphy.org/chart ; see also older versions of the chart below and to the right ]
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Was just about to say that; glad you did. If Adam crashed on Earth 65 mya, he would only find small dinos, or perhaps only birds. And some scuttling little mammals. The ecosystem would probably still be in flux.
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[…] (14) SNAPPING THE SUSPENDERS OF DISBELIEF. Camestros Felapton does a pretty entertaining review of the movie in “Review: 65”. […]
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Gotta agree. It was good enough to watch, once.
And only once.
Also, the young actress is Ariana Greenblatt. She did a great job…again, with what she was given…and was capable of acting with Driver. Not bad for someone that young.
Regards,
Dann
We must never mistake disagreement between Americans on political or moral issues to be an indication of their level of patriotism. If you don’t like what I say or don’t agree with where I stand on certain issues, then good. I’m glad we’re in America and don’t have to oppress each other over it. – Craig Ferguson
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Craigy Ferg must have said that many years ago, because people in the US oppress each other all the time now for simply being registered with another party — who are all evil according to the biggest flag-wavers.
But I’m not saying anything that anyone who’s female, PoC, or LGBTQ+ isn’t suffering from now more than in the recent past doesn’t know.
(And as always, the Jewish people.)
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